Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (30 page)

Six hours later, relaxing at home after his shift, Moran was watching the local news when he saw a report about two fugitive teenage boys. When he saw their pictures—the same faces he saw in the Audi—he ran to the phone and dialed the New Hampshire State Police. Moran was quickly transferred to the command center, and soon after he was talking to an FBI agent. Investigators had their first solid lead about where the duo was and which way they might be heading.

T
he town of Sturbridge would like to be best known for Old Sturbridge Village, a two-hundred-acre recreation of what life was like

in a small New England town in the years after the Revolution. But to most travelers, Sturbridge is most familiar for its location at the crossroads of New England. The town lies at the intersection of the Massachusetts Turnpike and Interstate 84, which makes Sturbridge the perfect place for a truck stop.

After following Moran’s directions to an Xtra Mart for gas, Robert and Jim found their way to the Sturbridge Isles truck stop and eased the Audi into a parking spot in a rear lot. They walked into the Sturbridge Isles diner the morning of Friday, February 16, and began a daylong quest to find a trucker willing to give them a lift. One rejection followed another—insurance rules barred most truckers from taking riders. While they waited, Robert and Jim used the Audi as a base, returning several times to grab rest and their belongings.

Around four in the afternoon, short-order cook Joe Paquette parked his car nearby and saw the pair climb out of the Audi and slip on their backpacks. Left behind was the usual detritus found in a teenager’s car—gloves, receipts, clothing, an atlas, a knapsack. There also were some other, less typical items. A brown wallet was tucked in the console between the front seats. In the trunk was a tool box containing two knives, one a hunting knife and the other a military knife. The blades were covered by worn sheaths held together with duct tape, but there was nothing special to distinguish them. Such knives and sheaths were as common in Vermont and New Hampshire as maple trees and rolling hills. Later, it would occur to investigators that if the Zantops’ killers had used those knives and left behind those sheaths, they might never have been apprehended.

As darkness approached, Robert and Jim were sitting inside the truck-stop diner, where fifteen-year-old Zack Mathiew of Holland, Massachusetts, saw one smoking a cigarette and the other drinking coffee. Waitress Carrie Morris, a sixteen-year-old from Sturbridge, noticed how one sat in a booth while the other paced by a window, walking rapidly back and forth and looking nervous.

Paquette, the cook, saw the two again around 5:30
P
.
M
., brushing their teeth in the men’s bathroom. Jim had forgotten his toothbrush in his rush to pack—Robert wasn’t the only forgetful one, but a toothbrush could hardly compare with the knives—so he bought a new one at the Sturbridge Isles. Diner hostess Sharon Palmer thought they were runaways, and she thought Jim might have been crying. Palmer watched as they walked through a lounge area, looking for friendly truckers heading toward California.

A few hours later, Palmer sent a male trucker into the men’s room, to look for the pair and maybe eavesdrop on their conversation. Another waitress wondered aloud if they should call the police. But the trucker came out and said the bathroom was empty.

Robert and Jim had caught a ride.

T
hat same afternoon, a Vermont State Police cruiser parked in front of the Tulloch house on Main Street. It was an unmistakably odd sight

for Chelsea that got people talking. Something was clearly up, but no one knew what. Soon, word began to circulate that police were looking for the boys—a second cruiser was parked at the Parker house on West Hill. But why? It was fast becoming the talk of the town.

The weird quality of the day only grew stranger as the afternoon wore on. Pat Davenport, the school principal, took a call from a state police detective from the nearby barracks in Bethel. The two were familiar with one another because of their respective positions and, ordinarily, could talk easily. But Davenport found the normally affable Detective Sergeant Ray Keefe guarded.

Keefe asked her if Robert and Jim were in school.

Davenport checked the daily attendance list and told the detective the boys had not come in. But, she added, the two had been in school the day before, Thursday.

“Don’t let them in,” Keefe told her. The detective then advised her, “If you see them, lock them out.” If anyone spotted the boys, notify him immediately.

The instructions unnerved the school principal. She asked what was going on.

The situation is dangerous, said Keefe. How dangerous? Davenport asked.

Extremely dangerous, said Keefe.

The principal was looking for specifics, but got none. Finding herself in a verbal dance, unable to get a straight answer, she tried to come at it from another angle. Should I be concerned?

Very concerned, said Keefe.

The detective wasn’t in a position to disclose any hard information, but the truth was that the police were worried the boys might show up at the school for a “Columbine-type thing.” Rather than trigger panic by referring specifically to that bloodbath, Keefe stressed locking the boys out.

Davenport got the message. It wasn’t just Keefe’s manner, but also the fact that Keefe was a detective on the department’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations. The BCI unit didn’t bother with petty crimes; it focused on felonies like rape and murder. Davenport toured the school and checked to make sure doors that should be locked were, in fact, locked. Then she assigned a free faculty member to stand watch at the main and only unlocked entrance.

As evening came, crowds of Chelseans drifted toward the school. The Chelsea Red Devil basketball team was playing a visiting squad from Williamstown. By the time the game got under way, an anxious Davenport had notified the janitors, the athletic director, and some teachers to watch out for Robert and Jim. Fans and spectators carried word of the cruiser at the Tulloch house as they entered the gym, and the unusual tableau was heightened by the sight of investigators in plainclothes mingling in the crowd and around the periphery of the game, eyes not focused on the action but scanning all around. They stood out because of their dress—neat and much more formal than the country casual of Chelsea—and also because some wore guns on their hips.

Still, spirits in the gym were high. Chelsea not only won the game, but history was made. Brad Johnson became the first Chelsea player to join the “1,000 Point Club” in his junior year. Pouring out of the gym and into the night were happy teammates like Zack Courts and Coltere Savidge, parents, teachers, and kids. They climbed into pickups and cars and headed down Main Street in the picturesque village blanketed in fresh snow.

But the town’s landscape had changed indelibly.

Following the win, Brad Johnson, his family, and a group of people wandered across the street to The Pines to eat, shoot pool, play music, and celebrate the historic scoring achievement. It was at this moment that the mystery of the night deepened.

Just after 10
P
.
M
., Chelseans were brought up short by the sight of a convoy of police vehicles lumbering slowly into town from the south. For a small town that didn’t have its own squad car and for the most

part didn’t lock its doors, it was an alien invasion, a close encounter of an unprecedented kind.

The usual rumble through town was the sound of a tractor pulling a spreader, or one of Jack Johnson’s logging trucks. But here came a caravan of five state police cruisers along with a sixth vehicle, an oversized Vermont State Police forensics truck. Driving the front cruiser and leading the way to the Tulloch house was the detective who’d spo-ken to Pat Davenport earlier in the day, Ray Keefe. He’d never been part of such a massive convoy, which had actually been twice as big until reaching the town line. That was when half the convoy turned off to head up West Hill to the Parker house.

Chelseans, especially kids, began cruising Main Street, gawking at the convoy and wondering, Why the show of force? “We drove by Robert’s house and saw all these police cars, and we’re like Ohmygod,” said Kip Battey. Speculation quickly heated up—What had Robert and Jim done? “We were figuring,” said Battey, “oh man, they broke into someone’s house.” In another car were Gaelen McKee, Sada Dumont, Casey Purcell, and Katie Allen. “They must have stolen a car!” Sada Dumont said, only half-serious. “Or robbed a store!” someone else chimed in. None of them thought it could really be anything that bad. Tyler Vermette and Matt Butryman had been at The Pines when they decided to jump in Tyler’s mom’s car. The huge police presence took their breath away. “Holy smokes!” Matt said. The two boys counted the number of police vehicles outside the Tulloch place and figured the trouble was deep. But the worst they could come up with was that Robert and Jim “must have done something on the computer.” If that was the case, Tyler thought as he drove home, “No big deal—well, a big deal, but not that bad.”

Coltere Savidge and Zack Courts were wondering what was up as they headed north on Main Street. Coltere was driving Zack to his home a few houses down from the Tullochs’. The two seniors slowed and eyeballed the police. “Have you ever cut yourself and looked down and gone, ‘Oh, crap,’ ” he said later. “You know it’s gonna hurt, but it hasn’t started yet. That’s how it was. We knew there was no good rea-son for a forensics truck to be outside any house.”

But, like everyone else, Zack and Coltere had no idea what was really happening. Coltere dropped Zack off and Zack headed into his house. He was home alone; his father was away for the weekend. Coltere headed north on Route 110 to his house, just over the town line in Washington. His parents, David and Mary, were there, as was his younger brother, Cabot, and everyone talked about the basketball win and the strange police invasion. The Savidge boys decided to do what Chelseans often do come the weekend—rent a movie.

Coltere drove back to the center of Chelsea in his mother’s Subaru Forester. He was inside Will’s Store, holding the Nicolas Cage car-theft movie
Gone in 60 Seconds,
when two men approached him and asked whether he knew Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker. The men were dressed in plainclothes but had ID badges hanging around their necks, showing one was with the Vermont State Police and one was from New Hampshire.

They showed Coltere photographs of the two boys from their licenses.

“Yeah, I know those kids,” said Coltere.

The investigators said they’d like to question him.

Brad Johnson’s older brother was also in the store, and after he returned to The Pines, word spread quickly that the police wanted to question Coltere Savidge. Nervous about the whole thing, Coltere called home. After a couple of telephone conversations between him and his parents, and then the investigators and his parents, Coltere drove home to pick up his father.

Father and son were ushered into a conference room at the Orange County sheriff ’s office near the North Common. It was past 11
P
.
M
., and David Savidge sensed urgency among the officers. Still, no one knew why police were after Robert and Jim. “Maybe it was just a breaking and entering thing, one of Robert and Jimmy’s things that had gone wrong,” Coltere hoped. Or maybe, he thought, they ran away again.

The questions began: Do Robert and Jim have any camps in the area? No, said Coltere. What do you know about the boys’ first trip west two weeks ago? Not much, said Coltere; they’d said they wanted

to go rock climbing in Colorado. Did Robert and Jim use drugs? No. Have they acted strangely lately? Not really. Did Robert and Jim spend much time on the Internet? Not really, Coltere replied. No more than most kids.

Did Robert and Jim ever show an interest in knives?

Did you ever see them on the Internet shopping for knives? Coltere answered “No” to both questions, but this was when

Coltere and David Savidge finally began to understand why the police had invaded Chelsea.

David Savidge interrupted: “Can you tell us about this?” he asked. No, the two troopers replied.

“Does this have anything to do with drugs?” No, the troopers said. This is much worse. “More serious than drugs?”

Yes, they said. Extremely serious.

The troopers had adopted the same mantra Detective Sergeant Ray Keefe had used with Pat Davenport: “Extremely serious.” They told the Savidges that was all they could say.

“You will know tomorrow,” one said. “In the morning there will be reporters all over this town.”

David Savidge began putting it all together: the presence of a New Hampshire detective in Vermont; a situation described by investigators as more serious than drugs or drug dealing—“extremely serious.” The media on its way en masse.

The Savidges silently left the sheriff ’s office, climbed into their car, and drove home past the Tulloch house. Father and son looked at each other and spoke a shared thought: “This has to do with the Zantop murders.”

It was around midnight, and the two now were among the first to know the answer to the mystery of a long, strange day in Chelsea.

Soon other Chelseans began discovering the horrifying news. Town Clerk Diane Mattoon was about to go to bed when her sister-in-law called to share the conclusion sweeping through town. “What are you talking about?” Mattoon said, dismissing the notion.

Mattoon at least got the news from a relative. Others were hit right between the eyes by strangers. Pat Davenport was fast asleep when the phone rang about fifteen minutes after midnight. Pulling herself awake, the principal thought, “Late calls usually mean bad news.” It was a reporter from the
Boston Globe,
asking her “opinion of the prime suspect in the Zantop murders, Robert Tulloch.” Only then did she understand fully the depth of Ray Keefe’s concern that Robert and Jim not be allowed in the school.

Racing through her mind was the same thought that worried Keefe and other police officers all day—the possibility of Columbine redux. But Davenport had little time to process the news. As soon as she hung up—she gave the
Globe
reporter nothing worth printing—the phone rang again, and then again—more than sixty-five calls over the next seventy-two hours.